PayPal Service History

In December 1998, PayPal was established as Confinity, a company known for developing security software for handheld devices. It was founded by Ken Howery, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek. The main purpose PayPal was developed and launched was for money transfer service at Confinity and in 1999 it was funded by BlueRun Ventures’s John Malloy.

The next year 2000, Confinity fused with X.com and Elon Musk founded the online banking company. Musk took this step as he was optimistic in regards to the future success in the business of money transfer that Confinity was making. Later Musk decided to terminate X.com’s other internet banking operations in order to focus only on PayPal money service. In 2001, X.com company was renamed PayPal which expanded quickly till in 2002, the company’s executives made a decision and took PayPal public listing it under the ticker PYPL at $13 per share. This resulted in generating $61 million and more.

The PayPal’s IPO Company in July 2002 was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. eBay auctions started accepting PayPal payments, almost 70 percent and roughly 1 in 4 transactions were via PayPal. In 2005, to stretch its e-commerce business along with providing security support, PayPal obtained the VeriSign payment solution. A partnership was announced between PayPal and MasterCard, in 2007that resulted in the launch of the ‘PayPal Secure Card service’. This was software that enabled the customers to make payments on websites that do not accept PayPal directly. This was done by generating a single-use and unique MasterCard number for every checkout. Through this the company generated $1.8 billion in revenue at the year end of 2007.

Next the PayPal obtained Fraud Sciences in January 2008, this was an Israeli start-up company that was an expert in ‘online risk tools’. The acquisition was for $169 million and the aim was to improve PayPal’s ‘fraud management systems’. After this, in 2008, the company acquired an online payments company that offered transactional credit in US to over 9000 online merchants. The company was called Bill Me Later.

By the time PayPal entered the year 2010, they had more than 100 million active user accounts in around 190 markets in 25 different currencies. From the 2011 and 2013, the company was entangled with many legal issues. In 2011, PayPal also announced making a move to offline so which enabled customers to can make payments through PayPal in stores. After which the company continued to focus on its international growth along with Merchant Services division which provided e-payments on eBay for retailers. In August 2012, the company went into a partnership with Discover Card which allowed PayPal payments to be made Discover Card’s network, which held around 7 million stores. In 2012, PayPal’s total payment volume was US$145 billion, and the company accounted for 40% of eBay’s revenue, that is US$1.37 billion.

In the year 2013, PayPal obtained many companies like IronPearl, and Braintree. In the next years, a number of important figures left the company and the company also saw many accomplished professionals joining. On September 30, 2014, the company announced that eBay would make PayPal into a publicly traded company, separately. This spin-off from eBay was over on July 18, 2015.